The artist and musician Laurie Anderson, who is set to receive a Lifetime Achievement Grammy this year alongside Donna Summer and Tammy Wynette, has withdrawn her acceptance of a professorship at the Folkwang University of Arts in Essen, Germany, after it became known that she had supported a 2021 petition by Palestinian artists titled “Letter Against Apartheid.”
The letter that she signed called for boycotts against Israel, according to the statement from the university.
Anderson joins a growing list of artists who have recently been forced to abandon projects or roles in Germany because they have taken Israel-critical political positions. A statement from the Folkwang Museum said that Anderson had withdrawn from the Pina Bausch professorship after discussions about the extent to which “undisturbed and focused work is possible at the current time” on the project Anderson planned to carry out at the Folkwang University of Art.
“For me the question isn’t whether my political opinions have shifted,” Anderson said in the statement. “The real question is this: Why is this question being asked in the first place? Based on this situation I withdraw from the project.”
Anderson was to take up the Pina Bausch guest professorship at the Folkwang University in the summer semester this year. She would have been the second artist in the position, which was created in 2022. Marina Abramović was the first.
Hamas’s terror attacks against Israel on 7 October and the Israeli military response in Gaza have given rise to a fraught debate over the limits of freedom of art in Germany after a number of arts institutions cancelled exhibitions because they viewed comments by the featured artists, often made on social media, as antisemitic or anti-Israel.
The Berlin Senate even introduced a policy making funding for cultural institutions and projects conditional on recipients signing an “antidiscrimination clause”. It dropped the policy less than a month later after almost 6,000 cultural workers and artists—including Wolfgang Tillmans, Agnieszka Polska and Candice Breitz—had signed an open letter “for the preservation of the freedom of art and the freedom of expression.”
